


Schadenfreude

by glitterburn (orphan_account)



Category: Whitechapel
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-18
Updated: 2009-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 13:03:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/glitterburn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first day of the job is an emotional overload for Chandler.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Schadenfreude

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt 'camera flash' at story_lottery.

Chandler lets himself into his apartment at dawn. The rooms are cold, grey in the pre-dawn light. He has no clutter to trip over or navigate around, so he leaves the sitting room in darkness as he drapes his bow tie over the back of the sofa and removes his dinner jacket. He hesitates for a moment, uncomfortable at the thought of folding the jacket rather than hanging it in its allotted place within the wardrobe, but then he forces himself to put it down.

The jacket is soft, expensive. It looks like a shrivelled skin, discarded by someone else. Chandler remembers how the evening started and how the day ended. He became someone else within that period. Given paper and pencil, he could draw a timeline and mark off the peaks and troughs that made him into someone different.

His head is stuffed with concepts and notations from the procedure manual. On paper, he knows how to run a murder enquiry. On paper, he knows how to live. In reality, he feels equipped to do neither.

Unbidden, he remembers Cathy Lane. His past becomes fluid: he can taste the after-dinner cognac and the tender steak and the vomit that scoured the back of his throat. He can taste the industrial strength tea served by police departments everywhere and the fancy little sushi rolls he ate for lunch. The tastes clot on his tongue, turn to copper, turn to blood, thick and congealing.

Chandler hurries into the bathroom and hangs over the sink. He snaps on the shaving light and blinks at the gleam of porcelain and the shine of the taps. He runs cold water and listens to it trickling down the drain. The sound quietens him, as if the water is his blood ebbing from his body. It becomes a pulse, external yet reaching something deep inside him.

With a shock that almost brings fresh nausea, he recognises this feeling as desire. He tries to repress it, tries to deny it. He's been told many times he's fleshless, oblivious to lust, cold to love, but it's not true. He knows how to feel, how to want. He knows, but thought doesn't translate into action. Not with another person; not with any living being. He can only do this by himself, with himself.

It's a ritual. Sex – even solo sex – is messy, chaotic, disordered. The enjoyment comes from the need to impose order on it. Chandler opens the bathroom cabinet and takes out tissues, lubricant, and a pair of latex gloves. He kneels in front of the toilet and lines the items up on the floor, then rolls up his sleeves and eases on the gloves.

He sits back and unzips his trouser fly. He averts his gaze as his latex-covered fingers search out his penis. He's hard, and it's difficult to extract himself from the confines of his underwear. When he looks down at his erection, he sees it red and swollen, the slit in the head pearled with moisture. It should disgust him or arouse him, but it does neither. Instead, he touches it as if it belongs to someone else. The gloves help the illusion.

With his free hand, he drips lube over and around his cock. It's a curious sensation, and he shivers. He remembers shivering when he saw Cathy Lane's mutilated corpse. He remembers shivering at the delighted pride in Commander Anderson's gaze. He remembers shivering the first time he addressed the men under his care, responsibility and direction.

Chandler fits his hand around his cock and jerks at it. An emotion unfolds within him. It makes him gasp, makes his balls tighten and rise. A perverse kind of pleasure swims through him. He knows this instinct. It's ancient, hardwired into the brain. He did a course on it once, a long time ago, when he was at university. An Introduction to Psychology. Freud. Foucault. Sex and death, the beginning and the ending, the petit mort. Orgasm is the jolt to bring a dead man back to life; orgasm is the response that proves the human animal is still alive. When faced with death, humans have sex. It's nothing to do with lust. It's everything to do with desire. It's need, it's survival. He should be able to separate the two, but he can't.

He closes his eyes. Camera flashes of imagery burst through his mind. The pleasure steepens. His head pounds and aches. His hand moves faster. He tries to recall something good and desirable, something worthy of wanking over, but he can't think of women – of any woman – not with the memory of Cathy Lane still fresh in his mind. Woman. Meat. Carved up and butchered, lying supine with her skirt hiked up, blood spattered down her thighs. Pale thighs, fleshy thighs, her blood still bright beneath the halogens of the pathologist's lights.

Chandler can't shake the image. He grits his teeth, pulls down hard on the piece of flesh grasped in his hand. It feels distant, not part of his body – there's no sensation until he relates what he's doing to his reactions by the board house and in the morgue.

Don't think of a woman. He could never inflict his desires on a woman, so soft, so vulnerable, so easy to carve into bloodied pieces. A man, then. Men are tough. Men fight back. That boy – Kent... Chandler grips his cock tight enough to hurt, tight enough to make him gasp. Man. Meat. It's all meat.

A leather apron, a deer stalker hat, a long, glittering-sharp boning knife. The details swim out of darkness and he focuses on them – flash, flash – until they're too detailed, too close. He whimpers, imagining the killer's blade descending on him. He wonders what it's like to die. He wonders if he'd scream when the killer severed his penis and hacked off his scrotum. He can taste the fear in his mouth, stale and sweet; he can feel the sickening twist of lust as it overcomes his terror.

Chandler comes with the camera flashes of violence behind his eyes. He chokes on a cry, determined to be silent, but a wet keening sound emerges, staccato and then guttural. It sounds like a death rattle.

He slumps forward, resting his forehead against the toilet lid. The smell of pine disinfectant stings his nose. Beyond it, he can smell himself. If he looked down, he'd see the runnels of his seed trailed on the floor and spattered over the toilet pedestal. He's spilled himself for no reason. Motiveless. Unimportant. His orgasm, like Cathy Lane's death, serves no purpose. It means nothing.

He squeezes back tears behind his eyes – policemen don't weep – but then he realises he isn't weeping from sorrow.

He's weeping because he's alive.

He's alive and Cathy Lane is dead, and instead of feeling pity or horror for her fate, he feels blessed relief and hysterical joy.

Later he'll feel guilty. Later he'll pretend this didn't happen. But for now, he's alive and that's all that matters.


End file.
